Motherwell began the series Elegies for the Spanish Republic in 1948 and continued it for some twenty-five years, producing a group of over 150 paintings. Originally inspired by the poetry of Federico García Lorca and the tragedies of the Spanish Civil War (1936-1939), the Elegies all share a similar compositional structure made up of brushily painted black ovals on a field of white held in place by loose ribbons of black. It has been suggested that these shapes refer to the quintessentially Spanish figure of the bull and may relate to Picasso's black-and-white painting Guernica (1937), on view at the Museum of Modern Art from 1939. Motherwell felt these works could express in visual terms "a funeral song for something one cared about"-an abstract meditation on life and death in the colors of radiance and mourning.

New York. The Metropolitan Museum of Art. "Abstract Expressionism and Other Modern Works: The Muriel Kallis Steinberg Newman Collection in The Metropolitan Museum of Art," September 17, 2007–February 3, 2008, extended to March 2, 2008, no. 50.